Algebra Ideas

Algebra Tiles Project – Combining Like Terms/Solving Equations

While we were working on Combining Like Terms we used the Algebra Tiles. Of course the students wanted to play with them. Last year, I decided to use their creativity to make some art with math.

I had some students use online manipulatives and some using the actual tiles to plan out a picture. Then they used the paper tiles I made (I printed outlines of tiles on trimmed construction paper) and glued them down on construction paper. Then they wrote the expression that the tiles represented. Students simplified the expression. By the time we were finishing the project, we had already begun solving equations. So I tweaked it a little bit so that the students could choose a number that their simplified expression equalled and then they had to solve for “x”. In order to do that, they had to be able to cancel out the x^2. Therefore I had some requirements.

[...] I changed it a bit, because we haven’t done solving equations, yet. This was my old post: Algebra Tiles for Combining Like Terms. It has all of the links to the documents. This year, they had to have at least one of each of [...]

Thank you so much for this! I am a former kindergarten teacher and I now homeschool my kids. My son wanted some “hands on” or “fun stuff” like his younger sister, but I had no idea how to do that for algebra. This is so helpful, we are going to have a lot of fun with this next week! Thank you for all the pieces, the powerpoint will be so helpful for me to teach it and for him to learn it!